


without apology, what we do to each other

by horchatita394



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-10
Updated: 2016-04-10
Packaged: 2018-06-01 12:46:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6520354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/horchatita394/pseuds/horchatita394
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I wrote this post, "The Moment Mick’s Fist Was Hovering Over Len’s Face He Was Seeing The Face Of A Beat-Up -Scared-Shitless 14 Year Old Boy." and people reacted...strongly. I wrote a fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	without apology, what we do to each other

Brainwashing always sounded so easy; so clean and clear-cut and boring. You take a brain and you empty it out and then you fill it with whatever you like. It would have been easy for them to empty him out, to make him a gun and point him at Snart. But they were smarter than that. A gun doesn’t care, a gun won’t fixate and obsess and track down, won’t dream about the sounds of cracking bones, the smell of blood, the sight of pain in some else’s face. So they don’t make him into a gun. They keep him a man. They take away something else, instead, they snuff him out.

Still there is no perfect science under the sun or in the vacuum of space. Still, there are things which they would never know they did not know.

Chronos is armor, it comes off easy at the end of the day. So Mick sits in his cell like a fish in a tank and wonders – what did they take? Is it gone forever? If it is, does it matter? Is he better off without it? He thinks about the last time he watched a flame dance and lost track of himself, but plasma blasts don’t burn and so he can’t say he remembers.

He is a man, they kept him just so even as he lived outside of time itself and so – much of his life is not stored in memories like movies in his mind. He is a collection of relevant facts. His name is Mick Rory, Mick isn’t short for anything nor was he ever given anything as involved as a middle name. He was orphaned in a house fire and for most of his life he has been a certified pyromaniac. The cause and effect of these two facts is implied but unconfirmed. What follows after is an endless list of foster homes and arrests. Somewhere along the way there is Snart, like an unspecified landmark in the map of his mind. A sudden unexplained appearance that lasted until that night in the woods, eons and weeks ago. Then the void. Then the chase. That is all.

For ages all he has wanted was revenge, creative and ruthless revenge. It was what he wanted, he thought, because nothing else could matter. He had been betrayed and betrayal begat revenge. There was nothing more to it. He did not ever give thought to the nature of being betrayed, of what it meant that someone was capable of betraying you, of all that implied. Things were simple in the void and the vacuum, he had been hurt and would hurt in revenge. He even knew how he would do it, by hurting the person Snart loved most in the world – so that he would know what it felt…but the thought often stopped there; unpacked and unexplored.

He thought about it now as Sara walked away. Thought about what it meant that Snart had turned against him. It meant that once he had stood with him, beside him, for him. Disloyalty assumes prior loyalty and by all accounts that loyalty remained, but all accounts weren’t there. They didn’t feel the pain that stabbed before the aches of hunger and weakness set in. They did not know it felt like he’d been dying for days before death actually began to loom.

When Snart walked in the room Mick remembered fire. He remembered, in the detached sort of way he remembered things now, the way it was when he watched fire. The last time his eyes felt glued to the sight of something moving so graceful and untouchable, it was so long ago, so lacking in facts that it was hard to grasp. But he remembered now, somewhat; the single flames dancing in the roaring fire, Len moving like silk through the chaos of a job. Len always moved like an individual flame, so Mick hardly ever looked away from him. It made obedience easy.

Snart’s emotional as they speak, Mick realizes, and remembers – in the same way he remembers fire – the times it has been like this before. Times when Mick, so ready to burn down the world and go down with it, spoke with no rush and nothing to lose while Len pontificated at the edge of his nerves and on the brink of a meltdown. But no one else ever saw such a thing, and if two people see each other for who they truly are and no one else is there to see it – who are they really? He’s vulnerable, arms crossed in front of him, wracked with guilt and yet all the talk …

“All the talk in the world’s not gonna change a thing,” he tells him. But Snart knows, of course he knows that, and he knows what Mick needs and Mick hates him all the more for it. Damn if it doesn’t feel good though, to fight without a stich of armor, bare fists and bruising knuckles and to feel the way he pounds on Snart’s face. It feels good and right and ultimately it feels. He feels. So then it shouldn’t surprise him half as much as it does when he has Snart where he wants him, beaten to a pulp and ready to be finished, where a couple of bashes could split his skull open on the floor. It shouldn’t surprise him and yet. He has him there and ready for a final hit a killing blow, he has the strength for it he knows but then he remembers.

He remembers the heat of the fire and the tears on his cheeks and the screams in his ears and the feeling of powerlessness in the face of such a great and terrible beauty. He remembers the smell of ashes and how bitter it was, not just because they were left of the last people who would ever love him but because they meant the end of the flames.

He remembers the welts on his back and the burns he didn’t give himself and the punches he took until he was big enough, strong enough, and hard enough to hit back. He never stopped hitting, stopped asking who and why and just kept on.

He remembers a week without matches because the Juvie guards were pissy. Remembers how his skin itched and his eyes darted around looking for anything flammable. He remembers when he saw him, dancing like a little flame too tiny and hopeless to survive in the storm of that hell hole. He remembers how he watched and watched for days until the day the kid got too mouthy with the wrong guys.

He remembers his face all purple and bruised, the blood trickling from his broken brow and down the corner of his mouth. He remembers and suddenly he sees. He sees the face of a boy ready go down fighting to the last, ready for an inevitable death, ready and waiting with a fire burning in his eyes.

_Most people think the hottest part of the flame is the white part. They’re wrong._

Len’s eyes can freeze your heart even when you don’t have one, but when they burn oh, when they burn so bright blue. He remembers. What they took from him. His hottest, burning, living, fire. They snuffed him out. His to fan and watch and follow. His to burn in. They took the oxygen out of the room.

“It’s what you wanted isn’t it,” he rattles out from behind bruise and cracked ribs, “to get off the team?”

He thinks about the last time he watched a flame dance and lost track of himself, and sees the dancing blue flames in Len’s eyes as he swears that he won’t be anyone’s hero.

“I don’t know what I want any more.”


End file.
